Table tennis may be the only Olympic sport that’s played concurrently in frat parties and nursing homes. That it is a sport at all, and an event fit for the Olympics, comes as some surprise to those of us who grew up knowing the game as ping-pong, and who have been beaten at it handily by an octogenarian named Herb, whose athleticism was otherwise limited to short-distance tottering. But the sixteen-year-old American table-tennis player, Ariel Hsing, has the look of a jock in a Gatorade ad. She wipes the sweat from her forehead, pins the stray hair from out of her eyes, and plants her feet, ready for a tiny plastic ball to be whacked in her direction.

The incongruity of the game—rapid reflexes and controlled power over a court the size of a dining-room table—certainly inspires niche curiosity, if not universal appeal. Like a few other Olympic events, the sport isn’t all that physically demanding; one does not watch table tennis to admire the players’ sculpted bodies or choreographed grace. But, at the highest level, the creeping, mesmerizing mundanity of ping-pong is, well, a sight to see.

There are three women playing for the United States table-tennis team, all in their teens, and one man, a twenty-one-year-old named Timothy Wang. That each one of them is of Chinese descent may not be a coincidence: whereas American culture has hardly come around to viewing ping-pong as a serious sport, the Chinese play hard. China won its first Table Tennis World Championship in 1959, before the game was an Olympic sport; in the following years, the top man was Chuang Tse-tung, who played with what was called the “Oriental penholder grip,” and who told reporters, in 1967, “I owe my entire table-tennis success to the study of Mao Zedong’s philosophy.” After that came ping-pong diplomacy, and the rest is history.

Since table tennis was introduced to the Olympics, in 1988, China has won twenty out of twenty-four gold medals. (Korea started out strong when the sport premièred in Seoul, and won once more in Athens; a lone Swede snatched the gold in Barcelona, in 1992.) So far this year, Chinese players have won the gold and silver medals in the men’s and women’s singles tournaments. America has never taken home a medal in the sport.

This week, the China Daily cheered the American team, featuring a picture of Hsing and the headline: “Americans nail down rich nerd demographic.” The article noted, “Though they all grew up in the US, the players’ heroes are Chinese stars.”

Hsing, who made it the farthest among her teammates in the singles tournament, is a five-foot five-inch, hundred-and-ten-pound San Jose teen who wears colorful butterfly pins in her hair. She wakes up early to work on her serve for a half hour before she heads to school at Valley Christian High, where she is a rising senior. Then her dad picks her up, and she spends the rest of the night practicing (pausing only to finish her homework). Hsing started playing table tennis when she was seven, and by fifteen, she became the youngest person to win the national championship. The New York Timesreported that her parents dedicated an entire room in their home to help her prepare for the Olympics—automatic ball-return machine and all—and brought coaches from China to live with them. She has the trappings of a formidable athlete (and now, incentive to put off college to heighten her training); she moves around the table with the bounce of nervous ambition. She’s not just playing at ping-pong; for her, this is serious business.

Hsing’s fans include Bill Gates—she calls him “Uncle Bill”—and Warren Buffet, who invites her annually to compete against his company’s investors. She first met the unlikely devotees when she was brought in for a spar at Buffet’s seventy-fifth birthday party. Hsing, then nine, clobbered him. Gates, another table-tennis enthusiast, also fell to her paddle.

This year, billionaires travelled to London to see Hsing compete in her first Olympics. Buffet said, “I usually have a box of candy for anyone who can beat her in a three-point game. I don’t have to give away any candy.”

In the Olympics, singles table tennis is won in best-of-seven eleven-point sets. The team event, which is going on now, is played across five games: four singles matches and one doubles, in which players on the same team have to take turns hitting the ball. Regulation plastic ping-pong balls have a specified forty millimetre diameter and two-point-seven gram weight. They can zip by at ninety miles an hour, but they make a dainty little sound when they hit the table, like Fred Astaire’s tap shoes.

When Hsing, who is ranked a hundred and fifteenth in the world, entered the singles tournament, she wasn’t supposed to go very far. She was just a media darling. But in a second round upset, she defeated Luxembourg’s Ni Xia Lian four-to-two, and in the next round, she almost beat the second-seeded player: Li Xiaoxia, of China.

Meanwhile, on the Chinese version of Twitter, Weibo, a backlash was trending against what some users called “the lonely national sport.” Yes, China always wins. But it may not be worth getting excited about. Nobody else seems to care. “Finally it’s the Olympics, but now it’s just two Chinese playing table tennis on television. So boring and so lonely. I’m going to bed!” someone posted. Another asked of the team, “Other people aren’t playing it, why are you still?”

Table tennis may be appreciated most by those with a taste for irony. The exertion across a five-foot-wide table—players jerking back and forth, their fierce lurches to make the next shot—may appear oversized to the casual spectator. The event’s uneven proportions give the awkward impression of professional tennis players who stumbled upon a tea-set-sized court, shrugged, and said, “Let’s do this.” And it can be mind-numbingly boring to watch the ball dash back and forth, back and forth, without even so much as a backhander’s grunt. Nonetheless, over the course of about an hour of aggressive paddle-slapping, the players begin to stagger with sweaty exhaustion. During a break in her match against Ni, who is forty-nine, Hsing grabbed a dry towel to wipe off her perspiration and downed a bottle of water while her coach gave her a pep talk. In the end, she raised her paddle to the roaring crowds in appreciation. (When the men win, they tend to opt for the self-congratulatory fist pump.)

That a skinny teen-ager can, on a miniature scale, go as far as Venus Williams (they each made it to the third round on their respective courts), is something of an amusement to behold, and to smirk at. But it may prove that it doesn’t take big muscles to make a strong showing at the Olympics—only a small sport.